The Practice of Herbalism

Part 3 of Series "Medicine, Malaise, Herbs & Healing"

See Part 1 and Part 2 for more goodies!

We have tackled alot about wonderfully terrible ways to bring in disease into your game and also terrifying ways to up the tension during an outbreak. We now come to the part where we start talking about the healing side of things and try and lay the ground work for a later discussion. I'm all about usefulness though so while we discuss this more mundane way of healing and keeping your players healthy I'm also going to be providing alot of extended usefulness for Herbalism, the Herbalist Kit, and Medicine checks.

On and off through this series so far, and really throughout alot of posts on this blog, we have talked about how ingrained magic is in the world you've created. We've also talked about how mundane things function in a land full of wonder and magic. But now lets also look at the possibility that even the mundane is magical even if it is only in the sense that we don't understand how it does something. Before science in our own IRL world being able to use a plant to heal was considered magic. In truth it was our own kind of magic through understanding the world around us. I tend to approach Herbalism and Herbalist Kits in TTRPGs with this mindset.

If you approach Herbalism as its own kind of mundane magic in a world saturated with more boisterous and loud magic its easy to see why it is often disregarded or even worse discarded in favor of its spell slinging counterpart or magical item cohort. But weaving in not only the strength of Herbalism but the fundamental usefulness of it into your world will add all kinds of depth and fun things for your players to explore. Please if you are running an outbreak it is going to be suuuuuuuuuuuper useful, which we will get to in a bit.

First things first though lets talk about some of the things that you can do with your herbalism knowledge. One of the two easiest is simply growing the plant spell and potion components your team might need. Taking a single Licorice Root Shaving and creating a small patch of them, or caring for several Mandrake Roots suddenly opens up not just inter-party spell casting opportunities but also maybe some more interactions with NPCs. Your adventuring party can leverage them to get more gold by selling them when in a large city, or getting an NPC to do them in favor in exchange for a plant that maybe isn't local.

Now you could have your PCs grow the normal boring way, especially if you've let them start up a homebase of sorts, but I mean that's kind of boring. Its also very easily managed by using a slightly modified version of crafting RAW in the DMG and Xan's Guide. For those not familiar or comfortable crafting I suggest taking the few minutes to read those before continuing along to my versions for our purposes. Getting the needed bit or seed to start growing would cost what the spell component does in our case instead of half cost for magic item crafting. Growing times un-aided would take months instead of days which means time spent caring for the plant(s) that entire time with the need for water, sunlight and nutrient ripe soil.

Aided growing times could shrink down to weeks or even days at a higher cost of spell slots, growth potions, GP a day like magic crafting etc. A plant that has gone through aided growth will most likely have a characteristic that would help experts to be able to tell apart "natural grown" plants vs "magic grown" plants. With the "natural grown" plants obviously being more valuable given the amount of time needed. For a quick rule of thumb for growth times, take the spell level that component is used for x2 and that is the number of month's needed for a mature enough growth to harvest for a single use (x3 for 2 uses and x5 for legacy component that you can grow others from). So a Mandrake Root which is used in creating a Homonculous would take 12 months / 1 year (6th level spell x2) for a single use of the spell and 30 months / 2.5 years (6th level spell x5) for a legacy plant you can create cuttings off of to grow others.

A DC for plant care during the grow time can either be determined by the use of the component just like in the case of the growing example above or by natural vs aided. A sped up growth cycle would mean something could go wrong very quickly which in turn means a bumped up DC. I'm of the opinion of a base DC Nature check + Herbalist Kit proficiency bonuses of 12 for naturally grown plants and 18 for aided plants. You can also allow these numbers to be adjusted either way via player aid, additional growth factors, rarity of component, duration of concentration, etc.

BAM! The first easy thing we can do with it done now on to the next one. Why not also gather those amazing plants while you adventure off in far off lands discovering who knows what. This obviously can go hand in hand with growing if you want to take a plant you found while out and about and grow more of them. This can easily be handled with just the RAW foraging rules in the DMG but instead of rolling 1d6 on a success instead roll a 1d4 or if preferred you can say they successfully find a single plant if its rare. To be able to properly harvest it without destroying it, hurting yourself, or picking the wrong bits would be another Nature + Herbalist Kit check. For alot of these I do a simple DC 13 for everything unless it is super rare and unknown.

As you can see there is alot of room that DMs can work and expand if there is interest but these are the kind of rules I try to keep simple and fluid enough to wing it on the fly. Unless I have a PC super into doing this thing all the time, which I haven't yet. BUT I do highly suggest for a more in depth look at a foraging system to look at Dael Kingsmill's Foraging & Crafting video. If you are a DM don't be afraid to search out systems already made and really drilled down into by another DM. Look through it, take what you like, don't use what you dislike, and sub in or add things of your own. We as a community are really a gigantic over evolving open source library with new reversion and rule mutations. Rejoice in it~ and don't stress about always trying to reinventing the wheel...unless you are into that sort of thing, then have at it!

Alrighty we have the ability to gather and grow plants now what do we do with them? Outside of SELL SELL SELL for more gold we can also use them in poisons, potions, magical workings, and yes even in trying to help come up with a treatment for a disease. See how its all circling back together now? Good cause I wasn't sure it would there for a second. Once they are harvested they need to be prepared, often for storage, in a way that retains their potentially magical properties. Sometimes this also mean having to further prepare the item before use in order to make sure its potency is at full strength. Poorly prepared grade A+ components can quickly become epic fails in a spell. Its why people, and players, can make so much money and fame being able to do so correctly.

Well that's all well and great to talk about but HOW do we do it in game? It is quickly handled in a few ways - an INT + Herbalist Kit roll if you want to focus on them knowing how to properly prepare it, a DEX + Herbalist Kit if its a particularly toxic or dangerous thing to work with to you know not die from it or a simple skill check in Arcana, Nature or Medicine depending on how it will be used later. Arcana for spells, Nature for potions and poisons and Medicine for healing (like potion of healing but all salves etc). Which means while preparing things to help come up with a treatment and cure a disease outbreak that we will be leaning heavily on that Medicine check and probably INT as well. This might mean that it might be beneficial for say our Druid who is taking on the Herbalist role to partner up with the Wizard in the group or a local healer that is heading up the care of the infected. Your players don't, and shouldn't, solve everything solo but instead as a group working together.

We've gathered, grown and now prepped our herbal remedies and components. So lets get to our largest focus of actually using them. There is a massive disease outbreak going on around your group of players if you've been using this series to its full diabolical extent. They know how to try and research and break down the disease to find up what its made up of but how do they go about creating treatments and start on the path of halting it? Well the full blown magical flashy way we will be talking about next time, but obviously a nice simple place to start is Herbalism.

To use herbalism to create a treatment or medicine for a mundane disease you need to know what the disease is. We can use Investigation and Perception checks on groups to see common symptoms, Medicine checks on individuals to try and tell what it is doing to them. Then using a Medicine check, our Herbalist Kit, and any plants we've prepared to create salves, tonics, teas and herbal remedies of various kinds. RAW supports this in a general sense but we are going to be stepping it up quite a bit.

After a successful roll on a Medicine check with a patient who is infected you can learn 1d4 of the symptoms OR a number decided by the DM based off of the total you rolled. Once you know the symptoms you can work out the best combination of herbs to treat it with a Nature + Herbalist Kit check. Most DMs will probably hand wave the nitty gritty about WHAT herbs are used for each symptom unless it is something hard to treat. This is typically the best way to handle it since so many plants can be used to treat a multitude of different symptoms and aliments. As long as the herbs have been tended to during growth, properly harvested and prepared then their use is quite easy. One final Medicine + Herbalist Kit check is needed to prescribe the proper dosage and application of the treatment. This will only help with any mundane symptoms created by the disease and help weaken the infection, it will not rid the patient of anything magically corrupted. But coupling this with the magical healing treatments we will talk about next time will save far more lives. If caught early enough it might also help you get rid of a mundane disease from yourself or your party before it mutates into a magically corrupted one.

In order to cure a purely mundane disease a higher DC on the Medicine, Nature + Herbalist Kit, and Medicine + Herbalist Kit is needed. This DC should be based off of the current DC of the disease during its outbreak. A full treatment to cure a mundane disease takes multiple doses of the herbal medicine that can be either pre-prepared in advance (a check for each) or as needed for the patient. To determine the number of treatments needed take the current DC of the disease divided by 2, rounded to the higher number.

Tackling a magically corrupted disease with herbal treatments will only lower the DCs needed by the magical healing to cure it, as well as raise the likelihood that the patient will survive the disease. Think of it as suppressing some of the more harmful symptoms so that the patient's body can keep fighting it off. We will get more into the specifics of how it helps and works with magical healing next time.

As always I know I've dropped alot of stuff on you so far, its way I can these rambles and rants. But I would like to talk a bit about world building before we close things out. Establishing early on that the normal treatment of ordinary things is done through herbalism lets you set up magic as more advanced then most people can do. It makes the PCs extra special if they can, and makes any NPC highly sought after. Building in details like expanded what herbalism in your game means can seem trivial when you are putting together a whole world for your next campaign. But I find that not only do the little things provide alot more depth to your world then you first realize, players always freaking latch onto them. Don't ask me why they just do. So giving a PC not only the chance to make antidotes and potions of healing but really and truly making it versatile and useful in your game only helps everyone.

With that little rambling over with, I’m JustKay your regular DM Dalliance on the web and I’ll see you next post.

PS - Fun things to look into if this topic interested you. Shaun Hately, Frank Hansen, Angry GM, Giant In the Playground, Barsaive, Ch 2 of Xanathar's Guide to Everything, Sage Advice, Ch 5 DMG - Foraging, r/DnD post by u/hillermylife, Dael Kingsmill.